Integrated circuits (IC) typically include numerous passive and active components manufactured on a substrate material. Conventional ICs may include hundreds, thousands, millions or more semiconductor devices. As semiconductor technology has progressed, ICs have provided ever increasing performance. Furthermore, as semiconductor technology has progressed, it has generally been possible to decrease power consumption for the same level of performance. However, the increase in performance generally causes the power consumption in the IC to increase faster than technological improvements in decreasing power consumption. In addition, ICs may only operate at maximum performance a fraction of the time.
A number of techniques have been developed to increase performance and reduce power consumption. For example, sleep and standby modes, multithreading, multi-core and other techniques are currently employed to increase performance and/or decrease power consumption. Generally, techniques for reducing power or increasing performance are particularly suited for a given processing task. Therefore, one of the biggest challenges in designing high performance IC, such as microprocessors, is trading off high performance and low power operations required for different tasks. Low power consumption can be partially important in the case of portable devices with a finite amount of power provided by its battery. By reducing the power consumption of such devices, it is possible to extend the battery lifetime of the device.
Accordingly, there is a need to improve the trade off between high performance and low power operations of ICs.